If you wish to apologise or register a Leave of Absence Request, please use the links below. Any problems please use contact form and emails will be forwarded. Remember absences need to be submitted before 6 pm on Thursday to be credited. LOA's require board approval

Beat Girls tickets are available from Neil for the Concert at the Lake in Matamata.

Blair and Melissa have been nominated for RYLA on 17 March. Rotary Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA) is Rotary’s leadership training programme for young people and is designed for young adults who want to develop their leadership ability and who express a commitment to community service

Barbara expressed her huge gratitude to all members who helped with the international cricket at Bay Oval. She will organise a debrief.

The Red Puppy Appeal is being held on 23 March. The roster is on the table for volunteers.

RLI (Rotary Leadership Institute: Learning and Information) will be held 17-18 March 2018 at Rotorua. The course is a fun, interactive, hands-on series of sessions designed to provide Rotary knowledge and develop skills, with the content of the sessions building on each other. Contact Roberta to enrol.

Phil urged members to support the Annual Golf Classic on Saturday 3 March to raise funds for Kaimai School’s swimming pool.

Learn to play bridge and receive membership to all the Tauranga clubs. Only $70 for 12 lessons. Contact Stuart for details.

Ron reported back on the recent Rotary Foundation meeting, which is the highest rated charity in the world. We can look forward to a talk on their achievements soon.

The Great K Valley Adventure Race will be held on Saturday 3 March, to raise funds for The Graeme Dingle Foundation. It will be a great family day out with lots of spot prizes. See Warren for further details.

Barry Vercoe reminded members about the Tauranga Musica event on 7 October at TBC. Get your tickets well in advance (www.tgamusica.co.nz).

Larrissa drew a round of applause at the news she is having a baby. If anyone needs a pregnant lady to work for six months please call Larissa.

The relaunch of the Save-a-life capsules takes place Thursday 8 March, and two more volunteers are needed. Please contact Dave if you can help out.

Max referred members to the Envirohub booklet on their tables which list 140 Sustainable Backyard events in March. He urged members to attend at least one each.

Eduardo Mello is a Rotary exchange student from Brazil who gave members a charming and confident insight into the world of a newcomer to our city and New Zealand life.

Guest Speakers

Jo Allum (BaseStation) and Rachel Glasier (Akina) were introduced by David. Rachel started by explaining what a social enterprise was and provided examples of how they were making an impact on social issues worldwide. One driver for social enterprise is inequality and quoted the shocking statistic that one billion, or about half, of the world’s children, lived in abject poverty.

Examples of social enterprise were: the Gramen Bank in Bangladesh that offered micro-finance to thousands of women with a 97% repayment rate; SafeSurfer which protected children from internet pornography; Kilmarnock which provided inclusive employment services; and, Resource Rescue which refurbished and resold inorganic waste.

Social enterprises aim to trade for a margin and thereby develop financial sustainability, in contrast to many other not-for-profits who receive funding from non-customer sources.

Jo Allum then introduced a Tauranga Based social enterprise called Venture Centre whose mission is to ‘Find people who want to pursue the life-long learning adventure that is 'private enterprise', solving problems for people and increasing wealth and wellbeing’. They have established Basestation which is a co-working space in Durham Street shared by 36 people in a variety of startups.

Venture Centre offers a wide variety of services to the entrepreneurship community. For example, the Digital Enablement Programme is funded by Tauranga and Western Bay of Plenty Councils to bridge the skills gap for youth, small business owners and founders. In three years they will have developed a community of 6000. The Start-Up Weekend, Mash-Up Programme, Business Expo and Youth Enterprise Scheme are other examples. The Venture Centre is working with some fascinating start-ups here in Tauranga.

Rachel ended off by describing how Rotary is working with social enterprises in Auckland and Wellington. She challenged Sunrise Rotary members to get involved and use their business talent and mentoring skills to assist social enterprises. For further information please contact Rachel.glasier@akina.org.nz or jo@venturecentre.co.nz.

Sergeant

Ron ran a short, sweet and very amusing sergeant-at-arms session and fined Bill, Greg, Barry, Eric, Sally, Stuart, Ken, Chris, Vanilla Blanc, the Auckland parking helicopter, Donald Trump, Winston, Simon and the National Party, Air New Zealand, and the New Zealand passport.